10.
Learn How to Combíne

He can beat your’n with his’n and he can beat his’n with your’n.

Football coach Bum Phillips on
the ability of coach Don Shula

Asthma doesn’t seem to bother me any more unless I’m around cigars or dogs. The thing that would bother me most would be a dog smoking a cigar.

Steve Allen

Dr. Livingston I Presume (full name of Dr. Presume).

Unknown

To be is to do.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

To do is to be.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Do be do be do.

Frank Sinatra

If “a new idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements,” it stands to reason that the person who knows how to combine old elements is more likely to come up with a new idea than a person who doesn’t know how to combine old elements.

Here are some suggestions that will help you combine:

Look for Analogues

An analogue is a comparison between two things that are similar in one or more respects, and is used to help make one of those things clearer or easier to understand.

Is your problem similar to other problems? What’s it dissimilar to?

If the greatest benefit of your product or service is speed, what’s the fastest thing in the world? Can you compare your benefit to that thing? What’s the slowest thing in the world? Can you compare it to that?

If its greatest benefit is strength, what are the strongest and weakest things you can think of? Can you compare it to them?

Or what if it’s convenience? Or economy? Or dependability? Or simplicity? Or durability? Or whatever? What are the most convenient, economical, dependable, simple, durable, or whatever things or people or ideas you can think of? Or the most inconvenient, uneconomical, undependable, complicated, fragile, or un-whatever things or people or ideas you can think of?

Literature is replete with analogues. A poem about writing a poem, or a story about building a house, or an essay about flying a kite could all be analogues for living a life. A novel about a baseball game could be an analogue for good and evil. A story about cheating at cards could be one for adultery.

Whatever problem or story line or invention or project you’re working on, see if you can compare it, at least in one particular, to something else. It could help you arrive at solutions you might not have arrived at otherwise.

Break the Rules

Every activity has its rules and conventions and ways of doing things. They may not be etched in stone but they are etched in people’s minds. Depend on it.

Most of the great advances in the sciences and arts—indeed, in everything—are the result of somebody breaking those rules.

Vincent van Gogh broke the rules on what a flower should look like.

Pablo Picasso broke the rules on what a woman’s face should look like.

Sigmund Freud broke the rules on how to treat illness.

Louis Pasteur broke the rules on how to treat diseases.

Nicolay Ivanovich Lobachevsky broke the rules of Euclidean geometry.

Dick Fosbury broke the rules on how to high jump.

Pete Gogolak broke the rules on how to kick a football.

Igor Stravinsky broke the rules on how ballet music should sound.

Ludwig van Beethoven broke the rules on how a symphony should sound.

David Ogilvy broke the rules on how copy writing should sound.

Gerard Manley Hopkins broke the rules on what poems should sound like.

e. e. cummings broke the rules on what poems should look like.

Charles Eames broke the rules on what a chair should look like.

Eero Saarinen broke the rules on what a table should look like.

Antoni Gaudí broke the rules on what a building should look like.

Henry Ford broke the rules on how much workers should be paid.

Antonin Carême broke the rules on what a dessert should be.

Fannie Farmer broke the rules on what a cookbook should be.

We could go on all day with this; maybe all week. Suffice to say, rules are a great way to get ideas.

All you have to do is break them.

Play “What if?”

“What if?” is the game many advertising agency creative people play when trying to come up with a different way to present the benefits of a product or service.

What if we turned the product or service into a person, what kind of a person would it be? A man? A woman? A truck driver? An artist? A basketball player? What would that person say? How would that person act? What would that person sound like?

What if we turned it into an animal, what kind would it be?

What if we made the product smaller? Or larger? Or a different shape? Or a different color? Or lighter? Or heavier? Or packaged it differently? Or made it twice as strong? Or half as reliable? Or twice as reliable?

What if we made the service faster? Or cheaper? Or more convenient? Or more friendly? Or less friendly? Or more efficient?

Or slower? Or more expensive? Or less convenient? Or less efficient?

If we could add anything we wanted to the product or service, what would we add?

If we could subtract anything we wanted from it, what would we subtract?

What if it were suddenly invented or discovered today, for the first time, how would we introduce it?

What if a woman from Mars saw this product or service? How would you describe it to her? What would she think? Would she even want it?

What if the greatest benefit of this product or service were suddenly made illegal, what would you do? What if nobody wanted that benefit? What if everybody wanted that benefit?

What if we were able to make that benefit twice as powerful? Or half as strong? Or twice as important to people? Or half as important to people? Or more accessible? Or less accessible?

What if this product or service were the only one to provide this benefit? What if all of our competing products or services also offered it?

What if we went back in time to the 1800s, how would people react to this product or service? What if we went forward a couple of hundred years?

Play the same game when trying to solve a problem.

What if the problem were twice as bad as it is, then what would you do? How about ten times as bad? Or half as bad?

What if everybody had this problem?

What if nobody but you had it?

What if your biggest competitor had it?

What if we turned this problem upside down, what would it look like?

What would it look like backward?

What if this problem still exists next year, what will you do? How about ten years from now?

What if this problem suddenly didn’t bother anybody anymore, what would you do?

If you had the opposite problem from the one you have now, how would you solve it?

What if someone in another field—such as the music business or the airline industry or the used car business—had this problem, how would they solve it?

How would an architect solve it? A plumber? A surgeon? A poet?

What if someone gave you a million dollars in cash to solve this problem, how would you spend the money?

Remembering that people are the cause of 99 percent of all problems, how would you solve it if you could fire anybody you wanted? Or hire anybody you wanted?

What if you were the problem, how would you change?

What if your best friend were the problem, what would you say?

What if you were a child, how would you solve the problem?

Look to Other Fields for Help

In A Whack on the Side of the Head, Dr. Roger von Oech wrote this insightful paragraph:

I have consulted for the movie and television industries, the advertising industry, high technology research groups, marketing groups, artificial intelligence groups, and art departments. The one common denominator I have found is each culture feels that it is the most creative, and that its members have a special elixir for new ideas. I think this is nice; esprit de corps helps to create a good working environment. But I also feel that television could learn one heck of a lot from software people, and that R & D people could pick up a few ideas from advertising. Every culture, industry, discipline, department, and organization has its own way of dealing with problems, its own metaphors, models, and methodologies. But often the best ideas come from cutting across disciplinary boundaries and looking into other fields for new ideas and questions. Many significant advances in art, business, technology, and science have come about through the cross-fertilization of ideas. And to give a corollary, nothing will make a field stagnate more quickly than keeping out outside ideas.

The coin punch and the wine press were around and in constant use for centuries before Johannes Gutenberg saw the relationship between them and invented the printing press.

James J. Ritty was trying to figure out a way to record the cash taken in at his restaurant to dissuade his cashiers from pocketing so much of it. On a transatlantic steamer he saw a device that counted and recorded the turns of the propeller. He used the same principle to build the world’s first cash register.

Charles Darwin credited a chance reading of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on Population as the key that unlocked the mystery of evolution by natural selection.

Malthus showed that population was retarded by such “positive checks” as disease, accidents, war, and famine. Darwin wondered if similar circumstances might retard the growth of plants and animals, if their “struggle for existence” affected their fate.

“It at once struck me,” he wrote, “that under these circumstances favorable species would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species.”

Benjamin Huntsman, a clock maker, was trying to improve the steel that watch springs were made of. He noticed that the ovens that local glassmakers used were fired with coke and lined with Stourbridge clay. He tried the same thing and “crucible steel” was born.

George Westinghouse got the idea for air brakes while reading about a compressed-air rock drill they used for tunneling in the Alps.

Jim Crocker, a NASA engineer, got the idea for how to fit correcting mirrors into the Hubble telescope from a European-style showerhead he saw in a German hotel.

Before René Descartes, there was no such thing as analytical geometry; arithmetic and geometry were separate.

So were the sciences of electricity and magnetism before Hans Christian Oersted, Owen Willans Richardson, Michael Faraday, and others created the field of electromagnetism.

So were astronomy and physics before Johannes Kepler borrowed from each to create modern astronomy.

Something is going on right now in some other field that could help you solve your problem, that could give you a fresh insight, that could turn your thinking in a new direction, that you could combine with something you already know, that you could use to unlock your mystery.

Keep your eye and ear out for it.

Take Chances

Getting an idea usually means combining things that were never combined before—in other words, taking chances. So by definition you must take a chance if you are to get an idea.

Never forget this, for if you don’t take a chance, you won’t get an idea.

“The only cats worth anything,” said philosopher and pianist Thelonious Monk, “are the cats that take chances. Sometimes I play things I never heard myself.”

Play something you never heard yourself.